


Oyer and Terminer

by ohmyohpioneer



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Historical, Salem-esque??, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:39:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4477940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyohpioneer/pseuds/ohmyohpioneer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1693, Massachusetts Bay Colony (A Salem-esque AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oyer and Terminer

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for CS AU Week Day 4: Another Time

She burns from the inside out, that is her trouble. That the Devil sits beneath her heart and breaths fire through her being.

And she is black inside, she is sure - marked and as scorched as Satan himself - for it quivers and cracks and it will not be still.

Oh, she is a demon incarnate.

\---

It had not been mercy that had spared her life, Emma knows.

A screeching urchin she had been, and the stooping arms of Reverend Gold had plucked her from the steps of the church door, and had placed her under the care of the village.

Unruly child, chaotic child, she was. Orphaned and, if murmurs of townsfolk were to be made word, spawn of the Dark One himself.

No, the Grace of God had not saved her, for she was not light but shimmering flame. 

\---

She should never have saved that boy.

But he had taken ill, white and still and hers, in a time before, in a time when he was never truly hers, but was of her body. The only flesh she had ever possessed that she was sure was good was that boy, and she had remained silent against his wails, swaddled him tightly, and relinquished his light to the waiting arms of Reverend Gold.

And toddling after the Widow Mills, that boy,  _Henry_ , had scraped his knees, worn out stockings, and combed his hair, but not once did she see him stumble at his own hands, clutch at his heart, or cry at the howlings of the Dark One.

Free of whatever spirits rattled her bones. Free of  _her_.

But then the fever - his small brow hot to the touch - and she should not have gone, not have knocked at that door where the widow lived. His feet had been fragile, slips of being, blossoms of rose at his ankles, damp cloth pressed to sooth his skin.

She had felt it, then. The white anger the Devil had put in her, that bubbled at her furiously, and glowed moonlight at her fingertips. And it had been quite simple, to lose sight of her life, to forsake the meager existence she had bought herself when she had forfeited her flesh for his freedom and hers, and sigh her magic, her curse, into him.

And when Goody Mills had returned, had halted at the clear eyes and even breaths of her son,  _Henry_ , she grasped the boy, and had uttered no word.

But now Emma can see - she is damned.

\---

She believes the Devil sent Him as well, delivered Him to her as she to Ingrid.

A storm, tearing the trees, churning the earth, fracturing the seas, and a ship - shattered and scattered and spewed onto sand and rock.

And of the survivors the men haul ashore, shoulder and welcome to the village, He is the only one to meet her eye.

\---

Blood snakes into the water from a crack in her knuckle, the nearscalding water of her washing licking at the wound and her labor-weary hands.

“Goody Swan, is it?”

His voice is gentle and hard at once, and she pays no mind as she works a linen dress harder. “I am not good,” she does not meet his eyes, much like those in the village refuse to meet hers, “Nor am I the wife of any man.”

“Well,” mirth, now, “than I consider myself a lucky man.”

She relinquishes her hold on the cloth to find him in plain, black breeches, wrinkled stockings, and a loose shirt - the kind gesture of a God-fearing villager, it would seem.

“I’ve no place in my life for luck.”

How he had wandered to her home, a meagerly comfortable exile of timber and thatching, she could not guess, but it could breed nothing but slander and further revulsion.

“But for a man?”

And perhaps He was the Devil himself because the spark in her veins burned.

“I am not the friend you wish to make in this town.”

He stood in his place at the end her path as she rose and turned her back.

\---

Their lips spoke of visions in the night. Shadows draping familiar roads in ebony shapes that beckoned and whispered and hissed,  _come_.

The Dark One calls, and she his accomplice, they secret loudly in town - though she has never seen these spectres, has never conjured more in her sleep than the foaming crash of waves, the weightless relief of walking into the grayblue waters of the sea until her toes could not feel the bottom and her lungs could not feel the air.

But this night, as the rustle of sedge brings her to the edge of wake, He appears to her. Sand beneath bare feet and the hair at the crown of his head flitting under the hand of the wind.

All is sun and all is light.

\---

He finds her resting with chin on knee at the crest of a dune. She does not ask how, but why seems prudent at this point.

“Is this how you wish to thank your hosts and saviors?” she traces the looping path of a gull, and she hears the grass bend beneath him as he sits. “Consorting with a heretic?”

The apples of his cheeks were stained red from the morning cold and the slope of his nose and the severe cut of his cheekbone made her skin ache under the press of her curse as if to make itself home in his angles.

“Heretic? That sounds quite exciting,” he is closer than she has been to a man, to a person, since  _him_. “What have you done that so displeases God and his good servants?”

There is no evidence of fear in his voice. He has not the rending righteousness of the Reverend or his followers.

“Do you not know?” she raises an eyebrow, and were she not already a woman ruined, the nearness of Him and the candor of their words would shame her, dress her in a sheet, and send him to the stocks. “I am born of The Devil, the Dark One himself. I lure men and children to the woods, where they sign their names to my book and I consume their souls.”

His eyebrows move high in delight, and she vibrates and quakes in her marrow. 

“Well,” he plucks at rock, throws it toward the tide, “Please do place Killian Jones in your book, for I would gladly give you my soul.”

\---

It is dark and the ink of the sky has swallowed the stars.

Killian is again by her side as she darns a well-worn stocking he has managed to snare on nettle.

There is gossip now; it was to happen, she knew, but that this man, English and sharp-tongued, kind and in possession of a heart different from those who had run her to this house, who had spit at the hems of her dresses, to see this man so ruin his standing - she cannot be the cause of further ruin.

“Why do you remain here?” he asks the cricketing space between them.

“I am not welcome elsewhere,” and she would not want the charity of the town were they to give it, now that she has seen the price, now that she has seen what it is to be Good. “Why do you visit me?”

_When you know, Killian Jones, I will be the anchor caught at your heel._

“You and I,” he pauses, runs his hand along the wood of the bench that separates them. “We are lost.”

His sigh is heavy, “But perhaps, together, we may be found.”

\---

She finds him, as she does now each morning, with his face to the ocean and his eyes drawn closed against the salt air.

The breaths that exist between her shoulder and his have grown smaller with each waking sun, and this day, as the one before and the one before that, she thinks on how it would feel to press her shoulder to his.

The honeyed warmth of his sea-darkened skin gasping life through linen to her own, pale shoulder. How it would be to feel his life next to hers.

And perhaps his mouth, with the improprietous words and pink, true tilt would take the squall of her heart, the madness of the demon born unto her and quiet it.

“I lost Liam to the sea,” his words wing on the bluff, “my brother. I lost him to the sea, and when I near drowned, I was - I was more than content for my end to be as his.”

Those dreams, those dreams that haunt her - daylight breaking through blue above her and below her, and water filling her mouth, throat lungs -

“And when I awoke to find not my brother to greet me, but men, wreckage, I,” his hands make his hair a riot of black, “I was  _irate_ that this should be my fate - but your face, lass.”

His face.

She is damned and God is not merciful, and when she moves and presses her shoulder to him, so warm, her blood  _sings_  and there is nothing of sacrilege about it.

\---

He does not show the following morning, afternoon, and by evening she fears that perhaps she was too brazen.

But when he stumbles to her doorstep, white linen sticky with blood, long lines of scarlet at his back as terrible and as truthful as any word he could utter her.

“Punishment for fornication, Goody Swan,” he is delirious, and his body gives under the pain.

The hands she sets at the bare skin on his back are throbbing, embers of emotion singeing her from the inside out, and in a breath there is incredible light and then darkness.

Killian groans, puts gentle fingers to the blade of his shoulder, and pulls it away clean - wounds that snarled ugly, gone.

The stretch of his mouth, up and  _loving_  is unexpected.

“I  _knew_  you had magic in you, Emma.”

He kisses her as though she is all that is Good and Right and Whole.

\---

The road that leads out the settlement down the bay is as dark she can remember, swallowing the white flash of skin and shirt as Killian pushes onward. They will have to gain as much ground as possible before the rise of the sun.

The wind howls enchantments come and gone, those hanged and those pardoned, but Emma is at an unfamiliar peace.

The blue of his eyes shocks into clarity when the breath of light from her heart reaches her palm in a near-blinding glow.

“We can find our way now.”


End file.
